Candidates wait on line in front of a booth. When they finally get to the front and start asking questions about that dream career in engineering, the recruiter says he’s actually handling marketing jobs for the company and that other guy, also surrounded by a crowd of candidates, is the right person to talk to. Half an hour, down the drain.

For employers, it’s not much better. Recruiters spend hours talking to hopefuls who stand no chance of being hired, while the really stellar candidates who need to be courted get frustrated and walk away.

There’s no easy fix, but there are signs of progress. Nearly 80 companies, including Bank of America Corp. and bio-pharmaceutical company AbbVie Inc., have partnered with Chicago tech firm Recsolu LLC to make the process slightly more palatable.

Using the firm’s Recpass technology, job-fair attendees can submit their information (name, contact info, résumé) once via a mobile app, and then use a QR code, a type of bar code, to reload it for each company whose booth they visit.

Representatives from those companies can immediately screen for work authorization or years of experience, directing those who don’t meet qualifications to one area, where the applicant can learn some basics about the company, and sending top prospects to another group, where they can be courted a little more personally. Some firms even use the quick screens to invite candidates to hospitality suites for additional meetings that same day.

Recruiters can also take notes (“Recommend!” “Supply chain intern?” “NO”) on the virtual résumés during their brief meet-and-greets and pass clean and annotated versions along to HR and other hiring managers.

Recsolu charges on an annual subscription basis.

Dan Black, Americas director of recruiting at EY, says his firm can stay in a candidate’s good graces by simplifying the introduction-application-hiring pathway. And with the firm planning to take on 7,200 U.S. college students for internships and full-time positions in fiscal 2014, simple is good.

“Doing things effectively and also efficiently is mission critical when you’re talking about this kind of volume,” Black says. His recruiters can keep tabs on which candidates have had outreach from the company, who still needs follow-up, who might benefit from a reminder to submit the formal application. Before starting to work with Recsolu a few years ago, he says, tracking potential candidates before they actually applied was inconsistent, at best.

Bank of America used to have so many résumés on hand after job fairs that it would sometimes outsource the scanning process, says Erika Irish Brown, who leads diversity recruiting for the bank. Now, applicants are processed faster and their information can be shared with the appropriate hiring managers before the career fair is even over.

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Written and edited by The Wall Street Journal’s Management & Careers group, At Work covers life on the job, from getting ahead to managing staff to finding passion and purpose in the office. Tips, questions? email us.